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Category Archives: Twitter

Term 1 was massive for me. Being at a new school and a completely new year level has had me completely floored.

I feel like I have spent the entire term in a whirlwind of not really knowing or understanding what’s going in, which has been completely different to my previous experience of understanding most things and leading a lot of it.Things have not been bad, just unfamiliar. I think I have been so used to working in certain ways and expecting particular things to happen around me that being in a new environment has had me upside down. For the most part I have just spent time feeling guilty that I have not been making a great contribution to my team this term while I’ve been finding my feet.

Now that I’m starting to get my head around my new school and how it works, I am refreshed and ready to do more.

I have three goals for the Term to keep me focused on improving my practise and extending my skills.

Stay connected. Twitter is blocked on my school network and I am so used to checking in and stalking my eduheroes during the day for inspiration that without this frequent connection I have been dry as the desert. #vicpln I’m coming for you.

Blog more. When I get into the habit of blogging often, I start to push myself to try new things so I can share it. This can only be a good thing so expect to see more here in the coming weeks.

Reconnect with my passion: tech. Out of all the things I do in my job, I find that learning about, teaching with, and using technology to improve learning to be the easiest and most interesting to me. I intend to find myself a niche in the school where I can run with this and try some new things.

I am super proud of myself for diving in headfirst to a terrifying experience that turned out okay and was actually kind of fun. Thanks for the push @BecSpink.

I have something valuable to contribute in my own tiny area of expertise. I presented on something I know about and felt comfortable to teach others about it. At first their blank stares were off-putting but after a while people started taking notes and even asked questions that I could answer with ease and eventually I felt like… “Oh… I DO know what I’m talking about”.

“Curriculum is a guidebook, not a rulebook”. It’s so easy to get caught up in what the curriculum says that the meaningful learning can get lost. For me, I think this hinges on more of an inquiry approach across all areas of teaching which makes it student driven and most likely will tick off a lot of boxes along the way. This sounds very nice but it’s hard work and something I really want to improve on.

“Real things, real places, real people. If you can’t get those things in, you probably shouldn’t be teaching it.” Wow. This is such a great way of explaining that it’s important to make things come alive for students and to make it relevant. Should be second nature for teachers but I find once you’ve done something a few times it’s easy for it to get dry if you’re not careful (speaking from my 4th year of grade 2s in a row… sigh).

Lots of reading into frameworks and models for learning to do! Just some of them… new pedagogies for deep learning, 6C’s, The Solo Taxonomy, TPACK, ACOT2 Framework, ATC21S Framework, CCR, Competencies for 21st Century Learning.
I always feel a bit behind when people talk about frameworks and models for learning. I am so busy at work all the time that I don’t feel like I have time to look into the ‘big picture stuff’ like this. This means I often feel like I am just ‘doing’ rather than ‘doing with intention’. I want to better understand some of the frameworks behind educational design new thinking to allow me to think more broadly and make some impacting changes to my teaching, and I think some of these that Corrie suggested are a good start. He was really interesting to listen to and challenged me to think bigger.

“What would irresistible learning look like?” Corrie said this was cliche but I’ve never heard it before and I like it!

Well this one still has me floored. It was simultaneously the most interesting and frustrating session I went to. There was so much to get out of it, but it all felt too big to properly process. Anthony himself said that he was still getting his head around the concept of Disruptive Thinking and what it means… glad it wasn’t just me!

Changing trends in what is needed in education… from content to dispositions. Teaching and modelling skills and thinking habits rather than content and knowledge is something I think I am getting much better at with experience. It is something I am working to get across in my team and sometimes this is difficult. This session reinforced that I am on the right track with encouraging this with my colleagues.

“Looking at the rate of change in the world and the rate of change in schools, they’re not even close to correlating.” Most classrooms I see/have seen look exactly the same as they would have 200 years ago, except that now we arrange our tables in groups, not lines (sometimes not even this). The teacher is the dispenser of information, the students are the receivers. We have the knowledge to correct this, but not the… what? What are we missing that is stopping this from changing? Time… motivation… disinterest… fear… pressure… close-mindedness… set-in-our-ways-ness??

Time as currency. Could I do this maths in 20 minutes instead of one hour? Is this writing going to need more time allocated to allow it to develop? Should we work on this over a week or a month instead of moving on to the next topic?

What does disruption look like in my teaching? Bearing in mind that I’m still not totally sure about this concept, I think I’m doing just a little bit of disruption:

1:1 iPads as a necessary and well-leveraged tool for learning

Blogs as a way to connect students with the world, still a long way to go here! (I’m thinking Twitter, Skype, Quadblogging)

“Do sharks have saliva?” “I don’t know, guys. Let’s Google it.” Teaching students how to access information that is at their fingertips, teaching them to evaluate its validity, teaching them the skills needed to decode and comprehend and assess what they find out.

Starting to trickle some coding into my teaching

Learning as the journey, not the destination… problem solving, valuing mistakes as a learning opportunity, developing resilience and nurturing curiosity.

“The value of a curriculum is as a framework used to design meaningful learning experiences for students”. Time to get your heads out of the box, teachers. We’ve been told from day one that the AusVELS is designed as a guideline, so we need to stop treating it as a textbook. This might be scary for some, but we need to design learning experiences that reach students on a level that makes them suddenly take the wheel and take control and direction over their own learning. I’m pretty sure that’s where the valuable learning is at.

“This card entitles me to try something new. If it doesn’t work as well I as I wanted I will be free on criticism for my efforts. I’ll continue to pursue new ways to help my students be successful.” I would love to see my school be transformed by something as trusting, challenging and terrifying as this! In a school ripe with freshie teachers, we soak up a lot of learning sponge-style, and we’re provided with some great PD and introduced to some excellent methods as we need it, but sometimes I feel as though because we are somewhat fed what we need to know, we lose the onus to push ourselves and take control of our own learning, and begin to see improvement as something that is expected of us, that just takes up extra time at staff meetings or causes jelly legs before P&D time. I would love to see teachers with a passion, who discover something new that captures their imagination and try it out off their own bat, with time allocated to doing it throughly and in a considered way. And WITHOUT a bunch of grumpy faces in the staff room being judgemental about someone who just wants to improve their craft and transform learning for their students.

First up on my to do list:

Get blogging more with my grade! Make it valuable! Begin with Quadblogging.

Start a Twitter account with this year’s class, to connect with experts and other grades, to share and look outside our four walls.

Think of time as currency – be more flexible and smart with my planning, according to need.

Read about ‘student choice about how to learn’ (any article suggestions for me?)

Look more closely at the digital technologies curriculum and map it against the curriculum with my team. Implement lessons and blog about them as a reflection.

Get reading! Models, frameworks, inquiry, disruptive thinking… anything! Just take some initiative and learn something new and try it out!

Do my own blogging… to reflect and to share. My own workshop taught me that I have something to offer to the teaching community which made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Oh sure, I’ve heard it from a zillion reputable education sources that Twitter is the best thing that you can do to transform your teaching and learning, but I’m not there yet.

I started a Twitter account at a Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century PD. I had heard “Twitter is the best thing you’ll ever do for your teaching” one too many times and created an account on the spot, ready to see what all the fuss was about.

My first thought was “This is ugly”. Twitterheads will probably get all #mad and tell me #youarewrong, but if you really take a step back from the familiar interface, your Twitter feed looks ugly. It’s full of links, hashtags, too much punctuation, and too few correctly spelled words, all in the name of getting as much as possible out of 140 characters.

Once I got over this initial revulsion, I looked into what I could do to build my Personalised Learning Network. In a stroke of brilliance that was sure to expand my PLN from zero to hero, I tweeted my first tweet:

As you can see, I got a grand total of zero replies, and an anticlimactic one favourite. This was disappointing but I didn’t give up.

Since then, I have been slogging away, learning about Twitter by pestering my most Twittersome colleague and just googling everything I want to know. Slowly but surely, I am beginning to see the benefits of Twitter for myself. I am currently and primarily using Twitter these three ways:

To ask questions of other teaching professionals (and hope I have used good enough hashtags to get their attention).

Exhibit A: Asking for help from the pros!

To publicly get in contact with techie businesses to ask for help. Making this public allows other people to get in on the conversation; it’s not relying on one person or perspective for the answer, and it allows others to share in the solution.

Help me, please.

To share my blog posts and cool stuff I’ve done in the classroom so people can use my ideas. Twitter needs both give and take.

#Here’s a cool thing I did that I want to show off.

For me, Twitter is exciting because its full of thousands of brilliant people with brilliant ideas, and I can share in them without having to leave my chair. Every time I read my Twitter feed, it is humming with the ideas of educators who are pushing boundaries, taking risks, being leaders in their field, loving what they do and transforming learning for their students. They are educators who are not afraid to share ideas in case someone else gets the credit. They are educators who do not have all the answers but are still happy to have a go at your questions. They are educators who believe in change, and are not going to allow things to stay how they are. They are inspiring.

They are also educators who love inspirational quotes on semi-related out of focus backgrounds. I am not a fan of this. It’s almost a dealbreaker.

If images like this make you reach for a bucket, Twitter may not be for you.

Using Twitter to build my PLN is definitely making changes to my teaching, but could be heaps more beneficial. I need to stick with it and focus on using it more… my guess is that I’ll get out what I put in. My Twitter goals are:

Blog at least once a fortnight, in order to have more meaty stuff to share on Twitter

Learn which hashtags I need to use more frequently

Be part of a Twitter meet-up.

Things I can teach you about Twitter that I wish someone had taught me at the start:

A favourite could mean a few things, mainly: someone wants to show you that they ‘liked’ your tweet, or the tweet has been ‘saved’ or bookmarked for someone to come back to and read later.

In a sea of words, almost words, links and tags, a picture will make your tweet stand out from the crowd, in my opinion.